Initial multilingual translation

[volloholic]

Establishment of the multi lingual functionality and translation into at least one other language. (Probably French)

[Ogik99]

#4176
#5096

[dannyparsons]

We have now decided on the approach as suggested also for Climsoft here climsoft/Climsoft#200 (comment).
This will be simpler to implement in Climsoft and so will be implemented there first before being used in R-Instat.

[isedwards]

@dannyparsons - There are three commits in the Climsoft/#592 pull request for adding language translation.

• bb1d840 adds the command SimpleTranslateTool.translateForm(Me) to every form. You can ignore this commit. Hopefully in R-Instat all forms may inherit from a single parent base form, in which case you would only have to add this command in one place and all forms would then inherit the code.
• 7f3a803 can also be ignored. It adds the binary SQLite file that contains translations for the Climsoft interface. R-Instat will need an equivalent file.
• 93f2ea7 this commit contains clsSimpleTranslateTool.vb . You should be able to reuse some of this code. The majority of other changes in this commit are removing an older attempt at language translation from Climsoft (some of which is just hardcoded).

There are currently three known problems with clsSimpleTranslateTool.vb .

The first is that it used to use RESX files instead of a local SQLite database. RESX files are very limited - there is only one key and one value, therefore the implementation didn't use multiple columns for language_code, form_name etc. Instead the variables were combined into the RESX's single key using two underscores. E.g. en__mainform__titlecontrol__....

This led to obscure code like...

startswith = String.Format("{0}\_\_{1}\_\_", languageCode, frm.Name)

In SQLite it would be much better to implement this as:

language_code	form_name	control_name	original_text	translation
fr	mainform	lblTitle	Hello World	Bonjour le monde
...	...	...	...	...

The other two problems are mentioned in Climsoft/#592:

currently exceptions are raised and caught when controls are not found and also only static strings (that are defined at design time) are being translated

The easiest approach would probable be to rewrite language translation from scratch using clsSimpleTranslateTool.vb as a guide. Feel free to copy and paste any of the code that you need.

[lloyddewit]

@maxwellfundi I will work on this issue

[rdstern]

I query whether tooltips will be translated? If this is not possible initially, might it be possible in the future?

They can be useful in some dialogues and menu items. If they are translated, with the current system of producing them, then I suggest this could warrant putting more effort into producing them in more of the software.

If this is not possible in the current "system", then I wonder if it may be possible to change the way tooltips are coded, to facilitate the possibility of translation?

If this is possible, then the video team could be well placed to become also the tooltip team. I would become the tooltip producer, in the same way as I now produce the scripts.

[lloyddewit]

@rdstern Thank you for the suggestion. I will try and translate tool tips. I am implementing translations in the order of priority below. If you prefer a different priority, then let me know, thanks

• frmMain menu items
• frmMain other controls (e.g. split window titles)
• dialogs: controls with static text
• dialogs: dynamic switching between translation and English
• message boxes (e.g. startup and developer errors)
• tool tips
• dialogs: controls that have dynamically changing text

[rdstern]

@lloyddewit that sounds fine. And I assume this answers my main question, namely that sometime in the future tooltips will be included.

Hence, not for the sprint, but this means I should soon work with the documentation team on adding more tooltips to the software. Exciting!

[dannyparsons]

Tooltips are just controls in VB like everything else so no reason they won't be included in the system.

[lloyddewit]

Accidentally closed by PR #6621

[rdstern]

@lloyddewit I wonder about the situation regarding tooltips. For example the Prepare > Calculator dialogue has quite a lot of them? Are they done dialogue-by-dialogue or more generally?

[lloyddewit]

@lloyddewit I wonder about the situation regarding tooltips. For example the Prepare > Calculator dialogue has quite a lot of them? Are they done dialogue-by-dialogue or more generally?

The tooltip translation mechanism is in place and working. However each time a tooltip is updated/added it needs to go through the standard JSON/CrowdIn/database process. I will try and regenerate the list of all tooltip text, and add any missing tooltip text to the JSON file for translation. This should solve the issue for most tooltips. If there are any tooltips still not translating, then we'll need to address these separately.

[lloyddewit]

Replaced by issue #8323